At least 27 dead after tornadoes and storms tear across central US

ST. LOUIS — The call came late Friday to the Rev. Derrick Perkins: Three people were trapped in the Centennial Christian Church in St. Louis after a tornado had toppled part of its steeple, leaving it in dusty piles of bricks and stones.

A signal from one person’s cellphone helped Perkins and emergency workers find those trapped inside. But one of the people, a beloved longtime ministry leader, was killed, Perkins said.

“I was in disbelief — heartbroken,” he said, holding back tears. “Not only for the church but for the entire community.”

The grief and damage there is just a fraction of the devastation from several tornadoes that have ripped across the nation since late Friday, killing at least 27 people in Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia, and injuring dozens more.

Mayor Cara Spencer of St. Louis said at a Saturday news conference that she would characterize the storm as “one of the worst” in the city’s history. “The devastation is truly heartbreaking,” she said.

In Kentucky, the storm killed at least 18, a number that officials warned Saturday could still rise. Gov. Andy Beshear said that he worried “there might be a whole block out there where everybody is dead.”

“I hope that’s not the case, but you see five houses in a row, they’re just gone entirely,” he said at a news conference Saturday. He added, “You have a lot of trauma coming out of this one.”

The spring tornado season has been especially brutal in this part of the country, coming just weeks after similar storms caused deadly destruction in the region. On Friday, these tornadoes were caused by a major storm over the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic.

By Saturday morning, government forecasters said they had confirmed 26 tornadoes in a preliminary count, with most of those occurring in Indiana and Kentucky. While that number so far is not the most recorded in a single day this year — there were 107 during a tornado outbreak April 2 — states like Kentucky and Missouri were still recuperating from the damage from other storms this year.

Laurel County, Kentucky, was hit especially hard, with 17 deaths recorded there. One person died in Pulaski County, and at least 10 people were in critical condition, according to Beshear.

The ages of the victims ranged from 25 to 76, with most of them over 60, the governor said. Their identities were not released.

The scene was particularly harrowing in London, a town of about 8,000 in the foothills of the Appalachians, where residents relish the trails and rivers that crisscross their forests. The town is also where, for the past 30 years, the World Chicken Festival has been held, in honor of Colonel Sanders, of KFC fame.

At the London-Corbin Airport, hangars were left twisted and flattened. A plane was flipped upside down. Matthew Singer, the manager of the airport, said that no workers had been injured in the storm, but that several buildings had sustained immense damage.

In residential neighborhoods nearby, plots of land were covered by dense mounds of wreckage, and scores of neighbors were helping to clear the debris Saturday.

On Miller Lane, Shirley Sturgill said she found her 90-year-old mother-in-law pinned on her couch and unable to move after a tornado ripped through. “I can’t even imagine everything in your home gone, and it looks like this,” Sturgill said, pointing to the destruction. “I can’t even imagine what these old people are going through.”

Jeff Cornett, who lives close to the airport, sought shelter in his bathroom Friday night, but the force of the tornado pulled him out of the room. An object hit his head, and he was pinned down by debris next to an old suntan bed.

Cornett said his neighbors eventually dragged him out, and he received several stitches at a hospital to close a gash across his forehead.

“I don’t know how I made it,” he said.

This week’s storm also comes at a precarious moment for disaster relief efforts, as sweeping staffing and funding cuts have upended the usual processes for getting assistance from the federal government. Officials in Kentucky and Missouri confirmed that they had been in touch with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Politics has no place in responding to natural disasters like this one,” said Beshear, a Democrat. “And for the two events that we’ve already had this year, we’ve seen a White House and a FEMA organization that has performed well and has done what we’ve asked.”

The tornadoes killed at least seven people in Missouri, with five of them in St. Louis. Two people were killed in Scott County, in southeastern Missouri, according to the county sheriff’s office. Spencer said early estimates showed that about 5,000 buildings had sustained damage.

As sirens rang out Friday in Forest Park, a nearly 1,300-acre public park that houses several of St. Louis’ cultural sites, workers quickly hustled visitors off the grounds and the handball court into a basement until the wind died down. By Saturday morning, light fixtures had been shattered, structures had splintered into pieces, and some entrances to the park had been blocked by fallen trees.

Steve Burkhardt, the facilities and security manager for Forest Park Forever, which works with the city to protect the urban park, said, “It’s a whole different experience to see how beautiful the park is before and how it looks now.”

When the storm swept into Virginia, two people died in separate instances after trees fell on their vehicles, according to authorities.

This week’s severe weather hit at a time when the National Weather Service is facing staffing shortages, with nearly 600 people leaving the organization after the Trump administration ordered cuts.

In Kentucky, where highly organized storms known as supercells spawned tornadoes, all three local weather service offices that provide forecasts and issue warnings have several vacancies for meteorologists.

For example, the office in Jackson, which serves eastern Kentucky, usually operates with a staff of 14 meteorologists but is down to nine, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents weather service employees.

The office is also one of several left without an overnight forecaster, but Friday, it stayed open and was sufficiently staffed for the night, issuing 11 tornado warnings. It was “all hands on deck,” Fahy said.

On Sunday into Monday, a separate system could bring severe weather, including large hail and damaging winds, across the southern Great Plains and a slice of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas, including Dallas and Fort Worth.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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